India, iPhone Top VuClip Mobile Video Usage

While the latest report from VuClip is entitled Global Video Insights, it only applies to users of VuClip, which is a mobile video service that works on any phone, with any carrier, and in any country. So I would not say these numbers or results are indicative of the global mobile video viewing audience but are a slice or perhaps a cross-section of what that audience might be and do.

VuClip’s report goes on to state that they have served over 25 million users a streaming mobile video in June 2011 with almost 14 million of them coming from India and just about 5 million from the US. It seems that the majority of the VuClip following is outside of Europe as Spain and the UK are the only countries listed in the top ten and they are in 8th and 9th positions.

There’s certainly been some growth in North America over the past few months, but VuClip seems to be mainly focused on the Asia Pacific as there are three countries from that region in the top ten. I’m guessing this chart represents the top ten countries. They weren’t very specific in their data.

VuClip Views by Country

While the largest portion of mobile video views at VuClip comes from ‘other countries,’ India brings the most views for a single country followed by Saudi Arabia and then the US. The interesting thing, really, about this chart is that VuClip alone showed over 350 million videos, or rather, cataloged that many views. The problem, as always, is we do not know what constitutes a view over at VuClip. If it’s like comScore then it’s at least 3 seconds of a video (even if that video is an hour long).

Mobile Video Views by Device

So you’re wondering why I’m giving you all their statistics if it’s just them and it’s not very well explained. That’s because of this next chart which I found quite interesting. It lists the top 30 devices by number of views and I think shows how the US market differs from the worldwide mobile video market. Why?

Well for starters the iPhone is number one. While that’s not really all that surprising, what is, is that there’s no Android device in the list, at all. This demonstrates that, while Android is massively popular in the US and Google reports 550,000 device activations, daily, it’s not as widespread outside of the US at present. Or it shows that VuClip does not cater to the Android crowd. Now they don’t have an app, just a mobile website and WAP service. This could be part of the problem. While I personally use my browser on my Android phone, I don’t use it nearly as much as I would if there weren’t apps for tons of things like Facebook, Foursquare, etc. I would then have to use the browser. So that might be one of the reasons that this place doesn’t see as much Android traffic. It might actually be an interesting study, do Android users prefer apps versus the browser and do some avoid services because there’s not an app? It definitely plays into the instant gratification that drives many Americans. I can click an app and get what I want because I don’t want to type it into a browser address window.

Anyway, while you ponder all that, here’s their chart. You can see that, though the iPhone is numero uno, Nokia is rocking the chart overall.

Blackberry definitely has a strong presence near the top of the chart, which makes me wonder if that’s people watching video while at work (which was a recent subject of some interest at some other outlets). I am still amazed that Nokia has 19 of the top 30 and yet seems to be floundering in their overall strategy. Symbian was never my favorite OS for mobiles so that is surely part of the problem.

Wrap That to GO!

So again, while these are all just numbers from VuClip and not an overall global view, they do show some interesting trends. The iPhone is tops, but that could just be 5 million Americans versus say India which might have a bunch of different Nokia handsets in use. There are no Androids in the list for whatever reason and the Fly 2080 that is in number 6? It’s from 2006 and the fact that you can watch video on it is mind-boggling, isn’t it? This tells me that on a global scale, a lot of people could really use some new phones. It also tells me that if you’re aiming for a more global viewership, you might need to rethink things like widescreen, HD and overall quality and picture size, because all of that could simply be, lost in translation.

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